With the holidays fast approaching, a common question that I see many of my colleagues struggling with is what to purchase our next generation of budding scientists for the holidays. A recent study featured in CBE-Life Sciences Education showed that family plays a vital role in initially attracting young people to the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. As we look towards toy aisles, we are distracted by the massive aisle of pink for girls and robots, action figures, and toy weapons for boys, which have lead to many calling out the normalization of gender roles at very early ages that may also impact the career paths young girls take later in life. All of this leads to a dilemma for many of us with young girls in our lives to look outside of the standard pink aisle for gifts for those that have a genuine interest in the sciences.

Back to top.2. How Workplace Climate Changes the Knowledge We GenerateFrom: Jessica Kirkpatrick via womeninastronomy.blogspot.com

[Reproduced from the June 2014 Issue of STATUS: A Report on Women in Astronomy. The article below is written by Meg Urry, Yale University, Department of Physics and Department of Astronomy. Based on a keynote address given at the University of California ADVANCE Roundtable in April 2014, at UC Davis.]

Some years ago, at a major US university, a visiting faculty candidate was told by a senior colleague – an influential, Nobel prize-winning director of a major institute at that university – that she would not be welcome to work with him, that he would not allocate his institute's resources to her, and that his research group would be reluctant to talk to her because they were basically in competition with her.

She wisely decided to build her career elsewhere, but not before describing the problem and leaking his email to others at the university. The ensuing scandal created a classic conflict between bad behavior and first-rate science.

[Our contributors note that this study suffers from small number statistics, but the results are quite eye-opening, showing that male professors score significantly higher on course evaluations. -Eds]

Online Students Give Instructors Higher Marks If They Think Instructors Are Men

By: Lillian MacNell and Matt Shipman

A new study shows that college students in online courses give better evaluations to instructors they think are men – even when the instructor is actually a woman.

"The ratings that students give instructors are really important, because they're used to guide higher education decisions related to hiring, promotions and tenure," says Lillian MacNell, lead author of a paper on the work and a Ph.D. student in sociology at NC State. "And if the results of these evaluations are inherently biased against women, we need to find ways to address that problem."

On December 6th, 1989, women were targeted, shot, and killed for being engineering students. Today is a day to honour women scientists and engineers living and working in Canada.

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Instead of giving attention to their killer, I chose to honour these students by sharing the stories of women who have had a chance to contribute. Here are a few women in science and engineering in Canada, a thoroughly incomplete list of accomplishments and discoveries made by women who lived...

Dr. Maria Klawe recently discussed the opportunities that exist for women outside of traditional science fields in a Bloomberg.com article titled "Harvey Mudd's Klawe Maps Way to Woo Young Women Into Tech." That reality is what drives the president of California's Harvey Mudd College to encourage more women to enroll in the STEM fields, but particularly in computer science.

[A new leader at the American Museum of Natural History talks about motherhood, goals, and having fun in your career.]

Recently, educators and policymakers have shifted more attention and funding to students' education in science, technology, engineering, and math, known as STEM. Last month, for example, President Obama announced that his Educate to Innovate initiative raised $28 million to train 100,000 STEM teachers by 2021, augmenting the budget of $53 million already awarded for teacher recruitment.

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This past June, 41-year-old Ana Luz Porzecanski became the director for the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Originally from Uruguay, she has been working at the center for over a decade, having earned her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Columbia University in 2003. In late October, she gave a presentation at a conference called STEMinism: Inspiring Women Scientists for current and future women in STEM. I caught up with her shortly after in her corner office to learn about her career and get a few tips on finding balance as a woman in science.